Facebook to Penalize ‘Spammy’ Pages

Facebooksaid it will penalize the operators of pages that blast spam into people’s news feeds.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Pages are the Facebook home for public figures, businesses and organizations, like a person’s profile page. According to Facebook, some pages were disguising posts in an attempt to trick people into clicking on links, for instance touting a photo album but instead sending people to websites full of ads.

“We’re making these changes to ensure that feed spam content does not drown out the content that people really want to see on Facebook from the friends and Pages they care about,” Facebook wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Facebook said the crackdown focuses on three major abuses: “like” baiting, frequently circulated content and spammy links.

Some posts explicitly ask people to “like,” comment on or share a post to get distribution, Facebook said. But the company said that in many cases, those posts aren’t as relevant to users. People tend to just click on this “like bait” because they’re asked, Facebook said.

Facebook is also going to de-emphasize pages that share the same content multiple times. This “frequently shared content” appears in users’ news feeds too often, Facebook said. Other “spammy links,” the company said, use inaccurate language or formatting to “trick people” into clicking through to a website full of ads.

Facebook is taking action by decreasing the distribution of pages that employ any of these tactics. That could give a minor lift in distribution to pages that don’t engage in such tactics.